Athens, OH vs. Haifa, Israel
Welcome to this first round match-up in the fifth annual Strongest Town Competition! In this round, 16 towns are facing off, and eight will advance to the next segment of the contest based on your votes. We invite you to read the answers that representatives from these two towns provided to questions about economic resilience, citizen involvement, land use and more, then vote for the strongest.
Can’t decide? If you’re looking for inspiration, check out how we describe the Strong Towns approach, or maybe take a look at the questions that make up our Strong Towns Strength Test.
You may vote once per day in each match-up.
Round 1 voting closes at 12pm CDT on Thursday, March 12st.
Note: All entries are lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Photo Credit: Rob Delach
ATHENS, Oh
Entry submitted by: Robert Delach
What is your favorite thing about your town?
Athens, Ohio is a very open and inclusive city that encourages many voices and perspectives. We have a strong local art culture that includes an unofficial slogan of "Keep Athens Funky."
What is the biggest challenge your town faces, and what are you doing to address it?
As a small city (~25,000 people) and a college town, we are highly dependent on Ohio University as the primary economic driver for the city. In recent years, Ohio University has been experiencing gradually decreasing enrollment, which is similar to the demographic shift and similar trends at many other colleges and universities nationwide. We need to find ways to diversify our local economy to buffer against continued enrollment declines at the University.
What transportation options exist in your town for people of varying ages, abilities, and means? How easy is it to live in your town without regular access to a car? What transportation investments has your town recently made or is it in the process of making?
The City of Athens and Athens County have a bus transit system that is well-utilized by a wide demographic, is expanding service geographically to area towns and villages, and increasing ridership. We have a good bicycle network that includes the well-established Hockhocking Adena Bikeway that skirts the city and provides easy access to many local businesses and landmarks. In 2019, Athens was named a top 20 bicycling city in the United States by People for Bikes. This status was mainly based on the bikeability and ease of access in much of the city, as well as an excellent safety record for bicyclists.
Our city is fairly pedestrian friendly. The major exception to this is the poor condition of some of our sidewalks (Athens is an old city), and car-oriented development on a couple of major roadways in the city. We have a large number of residents that do not own cars, as well as a large number of university students that do not have cars. Athens just approved a permit for Spin shared electric scooters in the city. The scooters were recently deployed in February 2020, and have been receiving widespread use.
Tell us about your community's local economy. Who are the key players, big and small, and how do they help your town to be financially strong and resilient? What local businesses are you most proud of?
Our largest employer is Ohio University with around 2,000 local employees. We have a strong brewing sector with three craft breweries, a cidery, and a distillery all within the city limits. We have some local small scale manufacturing, a world-renowned musical equipment electronics supplier, and a rich local food economy. As I write this, I am sitting in Jackie O's Taproom and Production facility, which is considered to be one of the top 50 craft breweries in the country, and is a source of much local pride. Athens has an amazing Farmers Market and an associated local farming network and local food culture that is an integral part of the fabric of this place. We have a couple of business incubators and small business development organizations, as well as local non-profits engaged in helping make Athens a more resilient, responsive, and sustainable economic environment. Some of these local orgs include ACEnet, Rural Action, Athens County Foundation, the Small Business Development Center, Innovation Center, and TechGrowth.
If we took a walking tour through your town, what would we see? How does your community use its land productively to promote long-term financial resilience?
We have a thriving downtown (referred to as "Uptown" due to our hilly topography). We are an old city with many brick streets, old buildings, a large former State-run Asylum that is under renovation for office, business, and residential uses. Athens is steeped in Appalachian culture, and that is evident throughout the city. The city has fairly progressive administration and city council. We have a newly elected woman-majority city council (5 of 8 female members including council president) for the first time in the city's history, and in January we declared a climate emergency, the first city in the State of Ohio to do so. The city is in the process of making changes to its land-use zoning and related code to improve the business environment and remove parking requirements.
How easy is it to become an entrepreneur or a small-scale developer in your town? What kinds of support are available for a resident who wants to open a business or build on a small vacant lot?
The city is a friendly business environment. It is actively engaged in encouraging local small business startups. As I mentioned above in the question about the local economy, there are a number of organizations that are helping startups and local small businesses to develop a business plan, find funding, and advise them on how to get their business off the ground. The city is working on updating its code to better allow for short-term rental (e.g. AirBnB) businesses, and is considering changes to code to enable accessory dwelling units.
At Strong Towns we believe that financial solvency is a prerequisite for long-term prosperity. What steps has your community taken to ensure its financial security? Do local leaders adequately do the math on new investments proposed in your town to ensure that they’ll be able to afford them now and afford their maintenance in the future?
The city is currently on strong financial footing. In the past year, the city has been making good decisions that will help Athens continue to be a Strong Town into the future. The Athens Planning Commission proposed a zoning change to the Northern portion of Uptown that removed parking requirements and better enables in-fill development. It instituted changes to on-street parking that included the installation of smart parking meters, increased parking fees, variable parking time limits, and improvements to its Uptown parking garage, all using only funds from parking revenues. The city has created a Special Improvement District (SID) and multiple Tax Increment Financing (TIF) zones, an economic development mechanism available to local governments in Ohio to help finance public infrastructure improvements.
The city has generally been careful to spend local tax dollars in a well-thought out and responsible manner; however, they do not have a perfect track record of doing this. A recent nearly $4 million project to create a vehicle overpass in order to streamline car traffic at a busy pedestrian crossing is a case in point.
The city is currently debating permitting and regulation of short-term rentals. The city council voted in late 2019 to help fund a local trail development project, the Baileys Trail System, on National Forest Service land, that will have trailheads in three local towns, and has the potential to draw over a hundred thousand visitors to the area. This planned 88-mile trail system has already received national attention, and could become a destination for mountain biking, and hiking, driving tourism to help the city (and county) to build a sustainable economic solution into the future.
At Strong Towns, we believe that local government is a platform for strong citizens to collaboratively build a prosperous place. How are residents in your town involved in shaping its future? How do residents’ experiences, struggles, and concerns directly inform the projects undertaken by local government? Provide one or more examples.
Athens is a small enough community such that government officials must be responsive to residents concerns, ideas, and experiences, or risk not being re-elected. When I moved to Athens three years ago, I found that I was able to quickly get to know all the government officials and staff, and found them very responsive to my ideas and suggestions. The city regularly engages with residents with public forums, comment periods, and welcomes input on legislative proposals, transportation projects, and in developing and updating documents such as the City's Comprehensive Plan. The city has numerous committees, commissions, and boards that enable residents to engage and shape the city's management of resources and programs. Residents are also encouraged to attend city meetings, and many of them are live-streamed and recorded to improve access to everyone.
HAIFA, ISRAEL
Entry submitted by: Vitaly Gutkovich, Jenny Zel, Boris Levenshtein
What is your favorite thing about your town?
There is so much to love about Haifa and many things make it unique in Israel and the world. Its setting is incredible, located on the only natural bay on Israel's coastline, where the biblical Carmel mountain meets the sea. Many of Haifa's neighborhoods are located on the slopes of the mountain between beautiful ravines (Wadi in Arabic) that descend from the mountain to the sea. This natural topography means that even in the most urban neighborhoods one is never far from nature and a few minutes' walk can land you in an untouched natural world teeming with wildlife (among them wild boars, golden jackals, and very cute hyraxes).
This natural beauty might have something to do with the people of Haifa's tolerance and the special way in which its diverse population leads a shared life between Jews and Arabs and many other sects and religions in one of Israel's biggest mixed cities. Haifa is even the world center of the Bahai religion and is home to the magnificent Bahai shrine and gardens. Unlike places like Jerusalem, here the political tension is smaller, and people just live and work side by side in a neighborly way. There are many initiatives to bring the two populations together, including a bilingual kindergarten, where Arab and Jewish kids sing songs in Hebrew and Arabic alike, and an Arab-Jewish cultural center. Perhaps the best-known symbol of coexistence in Haifa is the annual “Holiday of Holidays” festival each December that brings hundreds of thousands of people to Haifa’s Wadi Nisnas neighborhood adjacent to the downtown to mark Hanukkah, Christmas and Eid al-Adha, on decorated streets below the beautifully lighted Bahai Shrine.
What is the biggest challenge your town faces, and what are you doing to address it?
As much as Haifa is known for its natural beauty, in Israel it is also sadly known for the air pollution created by the petrochemical and heavy industrial complexes situated on a large portion of Haifa Bay, adjacent to centers of population. For many years the city government was tolerant of the polluting plants, be it because of their political and financial power or even just to preserve jobs in the area. The fact is the industry continued to expand and the city got funding for a new stadium, hospital wards and other so-called donations from the industry's tycoons.
This cooperation probably played a part in the 2018 election when the veteran 15-year Mayor was replaced by city council member and professional city planner Dr. Einat Kalisch as Mayor, on a platform of being tough on pollution. City Hall is now closed off to these companies, and all industry regulations are strictly enforced. The new city government is promoting development that can replace the industry in the bay, financially and physically on the ground. The small Haifa airport located between the port and the industrial plants, which was ignored and underdeveloped for years to allow the industry to grow around it, is now being revived. Developing the airport which now allows flights to close-by Cyprus and the Greek islands to further destinations like Rome and Budapest will bring more tourists to the area, and any success of the airport will stand in conflict with the plans of the industry to expand. The state government might finally understand that city life and tourism cannot flourish until the heavy industry plants are relocated away from the population centers.
What transportation options exist in your town for people of varying ages, abilities, and means? How easy is it to live in your town without regular access to a car? What transportation investments has your town recently made or is it in the process of making?
Haifa has a fairly good transportation system that provides good service to the core traditional neighborhoods. This includes the "Carmelit", an underground cable car that is supposedly the shortest subway system in the world. It climbs the Carmel mountain through the historic neighborhoods. The "Metronit" is a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system that mainly goes along the coastline and connects Haifa downtown to the rest of the Haifa metro area. There are also six heavy rail stations in Haifa that connect it to the rest of Israel. Originally because of its large Arab (Muslim and Christian) population, Haifa is also the only city in Israel to enjoy bus service on Saturdays. Otherwise, all public transport in Israel shuts down completely during the holy Sabbath.
The overall picture is not so bright though, and outside of the historic neighborhoods, new construction has been car-oriented. The mountain slopes together with poor walkability in the post-statehood era neighborhoods make life in those parts of the city car-dependent.
Recently the new leadership has been passing plans to address the transport issues in Haifa in a strong way. A newly approved bike commuting master plan adds 120 miles of new bike lanes in all the main streets and roads of the city. (It also includes narrowing lanes and planting many street trees!) The bike lanes will be added gradually over the next years together with planned maintenance projects.
Another master plan sets forth a transit-oriented development agenda and allows extra floor space for mixed-use developments on well-served public transport corridors all over the city while keeping development inside the neighborhoods relatively curbed. The goal of this policy is to create 15-minute neighborhoods where fewer car trips are required.
Tell us about your community's local economy. Who are the key players, big and small, and how do they help your town to be financially strong and resilient? What local businesses are you most proud of?
Intel, Microsoft, GE Healthcare, Philips Healthcare, Google, Apple and recently Amazon all have R&D centers in MATAM, a high-tech park on the south edge of town. They are here because Haifa has two great Universities: the University of Haifa and world-class Israel institute of technology, the Technion. These institutions produce swaths of talent and whoever stays (rather than move to the center of Israel) gets snatched up by the tech giants.
The city offers a tax subsidy to companies in the park, and although more than 8,000 people are employed there it is comparably small to the hi-tech centers of central Israel. And indeed every morning tens of thousands of greater Haifa residents take the one-hour-or-so train to the Tel Aviv metropolitan area for work. The park is also in grave competition with neighboring Hi-Tech parks in Haifa's suburbs and exurbs to which several companies have already left.
The office space on the edge of town and in neighboring suburbs contributed to the decline of the downtown that once held offices for all the bank headquarters, international shipping companies, and much more. Now it has mostly emptied out of the bigger players that have moved to suburban locations.
The city's plans to revive the downtown have made a difference. They attracted colleges and their students to relocate to the downtown and offered a tax subsidy to restaurants and pubs which developed a buzzing nightlife in the area. Hi-tech startups started to open in downtown, where low rents and good food options are great for employers and employees. Intel, Microsoft, and other large companies took note of the strengthening ecosystem and started engaging more with city hall and the community in tech meetups, joint smart city projects, and hackathons.
If we took a walking tour through your town, what would we see? How does your community use its land productively to promote long-term financial resilience?
The tour will take you to the downtown where the renovated Hanamal (port) street and surrounding alleys are full of startup offices, commerce and excellent restaurants benefiting from great transportation access from the nearby Haifa Center (heavy rail) station, the BRT that runs parallel on the next block and the Carmelit underground Paris square station just a short walk away. The city has approved additional residences to be built on top of the existing 3-4 stories incrementally up to 6-7 story buildings, thus adding hundreds of housing units to the downtown.
Across the road towards the underground station we pass through the Turkish market, these narrow streets are now car-free and are the epicenter of Haifa's nightlife, bustling with trendy bars and restaurants.
We take the Carmelit up the mountain and get to Hadar neighborhood. Once the richest and most beautiful neighborhood in Israel, it has lost its glamour but kept its good bones. The architecture is superb; in fact, Haifa has more Bauhaus buildings than Tel Aviv, which was recognized as a world heritage site for its Bauhaus architecture. Involved citizens fight to preserve these buildings. Boutiques and fancy restaurants in mixed-use international style buildings were replaced by dollar shops and working-class eateries, but people still fill the streets at all hours of the day and patronize the many small businesses. Although parking is paid, the fees, highest in Israel, are still too small to create vacancies at all hours of the day. In an effort to help the businesses to compete with suburban shopping malls, City Hall recently introduced a new initiative called “20 minutes, go!” that limits parking in select places to 20 minutes, to create a higher turnover of customers, and better use of precious space.
How easy is it to become an entrepreneur or a small-scale developer in your town? What kinds of support are available for a resident who wants to open a business or build on a small vacant lot?
The startup businesses in the downtown have been supported by several non-profits and governmental organizations that offer office space and professional help to develop startups and traditional small businesses as well. InVent is an office space for entrepreneurs, HiCenter is an incubator that invests in tech startups, and MATI offers business consulting to startups and small businesses. All of these initiate and host meet-ups and hackathons that are the backbone of Haifa's entrepreneurship ecosystem. They have been followed by several for-profit office space companies like WeWork and others that help attract even more entrepreneurs, and that signals that there is something real going on.
City hall recently announced a new 20 million dollar private-public investment fund (20% city, 40% state and 40% private equity) that will invest in startups exclusively in the downtown in the next four years.
The city is now also trying to make it easier for existing small businesses that are burdened with high taxes and lots of bureaucracy. Once a month round tables are set up in city hall and small business owners are invited to talk to officials to sort out any problem with the business at one place and time and to streamline the approval process.
Development and especially incremental development are another thing that the city hall is trying to make easier. The residential parking minimums were recently reduced from 2.25 per new unit to just 1. This makes it easier to build new buildings or add floors to existing buildings.
At Strong Towns we believe that financial solvency is a prerequisite for long-term prosperity. What steps has your community taken to ensure its financial security? Do local leaders adequately do the math on new investments proposed in your town to ensure that they’ll be able to afford them now and afford their maintenance in the future?
One of the first things the new mayor asked her staff to do is to map out the city's infrastructure condition: which streets, roads, and sidewalks need repair. Lighting, sewer, and water were also included in a report detailing the cost of maintaining every piece of infrastructure to an adequate state. These numbers astounded us all. It will cost 700 million dollars to bring everything to a normal state—not great, not like new. Just normal and adequate. That's a whole year's budget, just for maintenance. One of the products of this work is a map accessible to anyone where every piece of infrastructure of every street in the city is painted green, yellow and red for good, mediocre and bad infrastructure state, respectively. It also states how much repairs will cost. The map is available here, and we think it's pretty cool!
The new leadership is trying to renovate the city by focusing on the existing neighborhoods, instead of building new ones. They have recently proposed a new and first of its kind approach in Israel based on the national TAMA38 program that allows residents and entrepreneurs to add stories or rebuild a bigger building to any building built before 1980. Residents criticized the plan for allowing large, out-of-scale new buildings on small streets with narrow roads and little parking. The new program mandates that on local streets inside neighborhoods, city hall will help residents to build up to two stories, without needing a professional real estate developer. The professionals are directed to main streets with good public transportation where they can build more intensely. This way every neighborhood is allowed to grow incrementally, essentially making a bad party good, to call it in Strong Towns terms.
At Strong Towns, we believe that local government is a platform for strong citizens to collaboratively build a prosperous place. How are residents in your town involved in shaping its future? How do residents’ experiences, struggles, and concerns directly inform the projects undertaken by local government? Provide one or more examples.
This year the city has initiated the use of an online platform called Haifa Insights. Every comprehensive plan and important presentation presented in the city council is also uploaded to the Insights platform and everyone can write their thoughts and concerns as an answer on the site. These answers are then compiled in an innovative manner into insights, and each insight is addressed by the planning team in their decisions. In the end, every answer by a citizen on the site is linked to an insight that leads to a decision by the city staff. For example, on the Wadi (Haifa's ravines) and urban nature rehabilitation plan that finished the process, 243 concerned citizens left answers that led to 8 insights that have directly influenced 7 decisions by city staff. This process replaced years of practicing civic engagement with very little impact, where several tens of residents would show up to a meeting and only a handful of them were being heard. It isn’t perfect, though, and people with less digital proficiency can be left out. One way the mayor is trying to bridge this gap are bi-weekly meetings in the town hall with up to 200 citizens, where they can ask anything of her and raise their concerns. This might be common in the US, but in Israel, such meetings with the general public are rarely, if ever, done.